The Challenge

Companies require reliable communication systems to allow their businesses to function efficiently on a global scale. Unify provides its customers with its range of OpenScape applications, which integrate voice, conferencing, fax and messaging into a single unified communications system, boosting employee productivity, increasing user satisfaction and cutting costs.

Convinced by the quality of its offerings, the company also uses OpenScape applications for its internal communications, enabling its employees based all over the world to work together efficiently.

Unify must ensure that its OpenScape applications run on a reliable operating system to minimize the risk of disruptions to customer systems. It requires enterprise- class performance to provide its customers with high-quality unified communications. At the same time, the company aimed to keep costs to a minimum, particularly in the area of software licensing. Equally, Unify wanted to be able to deploy customized appliances to selected customers, and sought a tool that would enable it to rapidly build full application and operating system stacks ready for immediate deployment.

“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides us with an enterprise-class environment for hosting applications that offers the performance, service and availability our customers require, at an affordable operational cost.”

SUSE fully supports the solution, and provides Unify with the security patches it needs to keep its customers’ systems up to date, minimizing security risks and improving performance. “We can set up our systems to automatically download security patches, saving us time on system administration,” says Robinigg. “Without automation, it would be very difficult for us to keep more than a million customer systems up to date without spending excessive time and money on system administration.”

Choosing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the strategic platform for its unified communications software is also a key enabler for the company’s strategy of delivering packaged applications to its customers.

Robinigg says, “Using SUSE Studio to configure customized appliances means that we only deploy the components we actually need. This enables us to build customized operating system images that have a smaller footprint, reducing complexity, enhancing performance and improving security for our customers.”

The Results

Using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server enables Unify to focus on its core business of offering cost-effective unified communications systems to its customers.